England jaunts: Codes, Laughs, and a Crab

For the middle of our England trip we each selected one day to do as we wished. For Dave, this began with a two-hour bus ride from Cambridge to the town of Milton Keynes, which is certainly a different type of community than the mostly old medieval settlements we are used to! It’s a planned town with grids and radial streets, all parking lots and office buildings down one very broad main street. We arrived beside an enormous mall, the like of which I have never seen this side of California, but on a gloomy day it was not unpleasant to make our way through it, stop for a quick lunch among the Milton Keynesians, and be on our way just one stop over to Bletchley Park.

Now famous as the setting for The Imitation Game, this former secret codebreaking site has capitalized on its mystique and declassification popularity with informative, multi-media interpretation for visitors and is a intriguing introduction to the realm of early computing, wartime secrecy and cryptography, and the logistics of breaking all those codes. This is more up Dave’s alley than mine, but the sun came out during our visit, there was time for tea, and I appreciated all the background and reminiscences from the staff who worked there, many of them very young women.

They had to kick us out of the early computing museum — guess which one of us was the straggler– and we zipped back to Milton Keynes for part two of this strategic visit, which was a nice dinner at a Zizzi chain restaurant followed by an evening of stand-up comedy by an Irish comedian we like, who was appearing at the town’s very pleasant, modern theater that night.

After a jog the next morning up and down Milton Keynes’s arrow-straight high street, we were on our way south to Brighton. This was my choice; although we once spent a weekend at another Channel beach town, Bournemouth, I was curious to see a famous landmark in this city, the Brighton Pavilion. We were fortunate to have the very best weather of the trip on this day, all sunshine and blue skies as we walked along the beach, went on the pier, and took a sunset Ferris wheel ride.

The Brighton Pavilion, though, was certainly a memorable location. Pavilion is misleading — it was built as a small palace, albeit primarily for the private use of George IV, prince regent, and for giving parties rather than housing a family or a court. The outside is an eye-popping fantasy of Arabian and Indian elements (the white, mishmosh facade of It’s a Small World comes to mind), while the inside is an over-the-top pastiche of Chinese styles and decor. No photos were allowed inside, but the public spaces, including a dining room with a 1-ton chandelier shaped like a dragon, still impress after 200 years. It is a Vegas-casino scale of personal style. George IV was a ridiculed prince and an ineffective king, but I started to feel a little sorry for him and his overcompensation, a little desperate to impress and bring the fun even into his later years.

Brighton also has a lot of coffee houses, cute boutiques, public art, and clubs. It’s a little bit of a San Francisco sensibility by the sea.

We had dinner that night at a hip seafood restaurant called Fishy Fishy. Although all the other diners were partaking of fish and chips, we plunked for paella for me and Dave perhaps rashly ordered Singapore-style crab, which was served with a messy sauces and required many tools, six napkins, and half an hour to do justice to.

The next morning we had a very enjoyable run along the promenade walk and at beach level before allowing ourselves a traditional English breakfast at our boutique hotel.

: The parklike grounds and the formal house beyond it were the environs of some of the most classified codebreaking of Word War II.

: Some of the rooms of the main Bletchley house have been furnished in wartime tableaus.

: These unassuming “huts” at Bletchley Park were hastily built for teams of cryptographers and operators of the huge computing machines that worked through the daily codes.